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Despite its name's implication, the Microsoft Surface Pro actually has multiple surfaces! This design may have been to confuse consumers, but more likely was necessary to suit our perception of three dimensions. Checking out the surfaces fitted with the ports we find:

We tried every method we could think of to free the screen, including cutting the adhesive, to no avail. This Pro requires a pro method. Thankfully, we have one: we call it the Heat-It-Up-and-Poke-It-Til-It-Does-What-We-Want method. Luckily, we have the required heat gun and guitar picks ready.

Are there cables that can be cut when prying the screen/digitizer up? Where do we need to be careful? The iPad 2 guide was very clear about where cables could be problematic, and I still managed skip a step and cut the digitizer cable. I want to be more careful this time. :)

The cables are located along the bottom of the screen. The best place to start would be the upper left corner. First go along the top, be careful around the camera, then continue down the right hand side. when you get to the bottom right corner just go around the corner about 5-10mm. Now return to the top left corner and continue down the left hand side following the same procedure as the right. guitar picks / sim cards or similar are useful to keep the screen separated as you go along.

When all 3 sides are separated, gently lift up the display. The display is still attached at this point. detach all but the centre ribbon cable.

Now gently heat the bottom off the display, and when the glue is soft, gently separate the display from the tablet.

if you were to put this back together can you make it look like it wasnt opened? obviously you could tell if you opened it again but i mean can you cleanly close it back together and make it look like it wasnt opened? and do you need to buy the adhesive to put it back together succefuly

So just in case there are any other idiots like me, word of caution. Pry up on the glass, not the plastic that the glass is glued to. If you heat it up enough and you pry the plastic with some force, you can pop the screws right through the plastic. Now I need to figure out how to reattach the plastic with no screw holes. Gonna try double sided tape on the plastic and the new screen.

If you pry up on the glass its actually not too hard. And I've connected my new screen and it works. Just have to get it back together so it looks pretty :)

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Strapped to the back of the LCD is a small PCB housing a Wacom W9002 chip, that we assume is responsible for driving the Wacom Electro Magnetic Resonance (EMR) digitizer system.

In this system, developed by Wacom, a grid of wires embedded in the screen generate magnetic fields that induce current in a coil in the tip of the tablet pen, both powering it and indicating its position over the grid. The pen then wirelessly returns that location data, along with pressure and click information.

We also found the LCD display driver, a Samsung WiseView N52A2NE, similar to the driver found in the iPad 2.

Here's the ginormous version of the LCD display board so you can view it in all its glory.

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Let's face it, there's really not much to see here. Eye can't think of anything clever, so if anyone nose something to say about the Surface Pro with its display removed, please mouth your opinion. I mustache you to keep thinking while eyebrows the interwebs.

Puns aside, we whip out our handy screwdriver and remove the 23 screws holding this plastic bezel in place.

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We've cracked the surface (figuratively speaking, of course—we would never damage a device…), but we continue digging deeper with our spudger and screwdriver until we can remove the motherboard assembly and the SSD.

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The Micron RealSSD C400 packs 64 GB of storage capacity. It can read 500MB/s and write 95 MB/s — all in a tiny 1.8" form factor.

Digging a little deeper, we find that a Marvell 88SS9174 SSD processor is keeping all those Micron flash ICs running smoothly.

PSA: The Windows 8 operating system chows down a fair chunk of the 64 GB total storage. After negating 30+ GB for the operating system, the full MS Office suite that you may not have even activated, as well as the factory restore image, the Surface Pro provides users with around 29 GB of usable space.

128 GB-outfitted owners make do with 89 GB of free space. Ed Bott performed some tests comparing it to the 128 GB MacBook Air, which has 99.5 GB free space.

Sorry, the numbers quoted here are inaccurate. When measured in gigabytes (billions of bytes) to match the 64GB advertised capacity, available initial storage is approximately 32 GB, and you can relocate the recovery partition to increase available storage to 40 GB. The Windows 8 operating system and included apps take up 22 GB of space, not 40 GB. See this article: http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-officiall...

Anyone knows the pins for the dock? And there are these BIG pins on the side that don't appear on the Surface RT, the Surface team said on Reddit that they are for charging the Surface (would make sense), so anyone knows what's + and - there?!

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The plastic top-rear bezel also doubles as a vent for the Pro's laptop-worthy hardware.

Two ports through the bezel act as venting ducts for the fans, directing hot air out the top. It appears that the Pro's fans draw ambient air in through the many vent holes spaced around the perimeter, then force that air over the heat sink's two radiators and out of the device, cooling the CPU and GPU.

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Lesson learned about adhesive in this teardown—we go straight to the iOpener in order to get the battery out of its sticky cage.

As always, we are ignoring some kind of warning. This time, it tells us not to remove the battery from the back cover. Apparently, to safely replace your battery you will need a whole back cover assembly.

We don't understand the point of heavily-glued batteries. This kind of planned obsolescence is completely unnecessary.

We assume the sweet camo pattern on the rear case interior is an insulating coating applied to the otherwise conductive panel.

It's actually not that bad to tear down, I'll take it over an iPad anyday. Just a handy heat gun and watch all the cables at the bottom.

I would be hesitant on a new surface pro or pro 2 however, I purchased a 64gb pro on ebay with the screen already broken. Following the guide here I got the screen replaced and upgraded the SSD to a 480GB

Yeah, this works. Unfortunately, I DID shear the two ribbon cables at the bottom, killing both the touch detection and I somehow damaged the LCD somewhat; it now can't display black, and I have some artifacts on-screen. I'll use the broken LCD until I get a replacement, but really, unless you're really careful, especially with the bottom edge of the screen, I'd strongly advise against trying to open it.

Bottom line: While the 1TB SSD is nice to have, it might not be worth the price. (€ 400-somewhat for the SSD, and another €400-somewhat for a new display assembly).

I had my surface pro screen badly damaged ( surface hit the floor vertically at the upper left corner and portion of the screen off ) I am not able to pass post the surface logo screen when I boot so no way to get to boot sequence to boot on another drive. Is this the only way to get to my data as I have important stuff not backed up. When I remove the SSD any idea how to read the data on it?

I don't know if they did. By the looks of the screenshot, they tore off the ribbon cable at the botton of the screen, which would kill the touch detection. And if they did glue it back together, they'd have probably gotten a replacement screen, and used some double-sided tape to put it back together.

First extract your Windows product key using magic jelly bean. Then you need a copy of Windows 8 or 8.1 Pro. Your product key will work. Here's the tricky part. You need to make a Windows 8 Thumbdrive with GUID Partitions formatted as Fat32. (Do not use MBR partitions with NTFS). There's instructions on YouTube for that.

I used my thumbdrive to clear the recovery partition and do a clean install. Don't worry about drivers. Everything will work even before updates.

In this step the question was asked about re-attaching the screen. It was said to use 3M double stick tape, 10mm wide. I've searched for the tape and found two types, one is foam tape and the other is the clear double stick tape. Which one is correct?

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Looks like this is going to be difficult to upgrade the 64GB SSD to a larger SSD. I can see that it is a standard size mSATA SSD card. But the hard part is the heating of the screen edges and prying the screen off in order to get access to the internals. Once it is taken apart, what kind of glue do you use to put the screen back on? The glue needs to be strong enough to be secure but also able to be removed again if needed.

-> Surface Pro runs an i5-3317U with an integrated graphics controller HD 4000 running at 350 MHz by default. While it's true that MacBook Pros integrate HD 4000, they are not the same - as the HD 4000 on the lowest MacBook Pro (i5-3210M, 2.5Ghz) runs at 650 MHz by default - 185% faster than the HD 4000 on the Surface Pro.

-> Corrected to "3rd Gen Intel Core i5 Processor with Intel HD Graphics 4000 (the same graphics found in current-generation MacBook Air laptops)"

hey!! I have a pro, and it broke twice , they gave me a new one each time (sound card failure, folowed by blowen fan bearing) I want to just give up on sending it back next time it gives in and fix it myself... so while I had it open I thought I might as well mod it out. so I was wondering, is the processor removable/upgradeable? what about the ram? I want to put in dual 4 gig cards for an 8 gig total ram and the i5 for an i7-3520M since they share sockets... how legal is that in terms of doing it without the need of a dremel and hot glue?

This is the most sensible, witty and wise tech site ever. I don't care what creed, color or even sex you are ... I love you. I wouldn't mind a summary or an epilogue after the last step however ... it just feels incomplete ... I didn't know if you were finished or my device froze. At any rate ... Thank you. Franc

My Microsoft surface laptop can't open, the outside part of laptop is just like a iron that is exposed to a rain water. I asked to repair it here in our place but they doesn't have any materials to open it, what should I do? is there any other chance to open my laptop? please help me to solve this.

I just bought a Surface Pro, second hand. Tragically, the day after I connected a broken/cheap 3.0 HUB and managed to 'fry' the only USB port. The port isn't able to provide 5V anymore, but the data connection still works.

Too bad the Surface Pro is too hard to open, let alone fix! Now I will have to provide a proper powered USB hub just to connect simple devices.

I wonder if I could draw the 5V power from any other connector around the surface, or even if I open the Surface, if I could make a connection between the USB's VCC pin and any other place in the device (an internal USB connector which drives the SD card reader?). But it seems too risky to open the device, and the external connectors remain a mystery.